Should autonomous weapons be banned?

[Aimless]

In the near future, AI will be almost everywhere and influence most aspects of life in the western world. This is more or less inevitable. What may be less inevitable is the development and use of autonomous weapons. Recently, a number of more-or-less prominent leaders and researchers in various AI-associated fields signed a letter calling for a ban on autonomous weapons.

What do you think of this proposal? Good idea that may help safeguard the admittedly already-precarious future of humanity or anti-tech lunacy that will jeopardise humanity's right to be exterminated forgotten?

How could such a ban be implemented and enforced? Would any of the major world powers actually go along with it or would they continue to develop these systems in secret? What kinds of problems may arise from some countries accepting the prohibition while others continue development? Can weaponised AI in the form of eg. autonomous drones and robots or even autonomous cyber-warfare tools become an existential threat in our lifetime?

The letter:

Autonomous Weapons: an Open Letter from AI & Robotics Researchers

Autonomous weapons select and engage targets without human intervention. They might include, for example, armed quadcopters that can search for and eliminate people meeting certain pre-defined criteria, but do not include cruise missiles or remotely piloted drones for which humans make all targeting decisions. Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology has reached a point where the deployment of such systems is — practically if not legally — feasible within years, not decades, and the stakes are high: autonomous weapons have been described as the third revolution in warfare, after gunpowder and nuclear arms.

Many arguments have been made for and against autonomous weapons, for example that replacing human soldiers by machines is good by reducing casualties for the owner but bad by thereby lowering the threshold for going to battle. The key question for humanity today is whether to start a global AI arms race or to prevent it from starting. If any major military power pushes ahead with AI weapon development, a global arms race is virtually inevitable, and the endpoint of this technological trajectory is obvious: autonomous weapons will become the Kalashnikovs of tomorrow. Unlike nuclear weapons, they require no costly or hard-to-obtain raw materials, so they will become ubiquitous and cheap for all significant military powers to mass-produce. It will only be a matter of time until they appear on the black market and in the hands of terrorists, dictators wishing to better control their populace, warlords wishing to perpetrate ethnic cleansing, etc. Autonomous weapons are ideal for tasks such as assassinations, destabilizing nations, subduing populations and selectively killing a particular ethnic group. We therefore believe that a military AI arms race would not be beneficial for humanity. There are many ways in which AI can make battlefields safer for humans, especially civilians, without creating new tools for killing people.

Just as most chemists and biologists have no interest in building chemical or biological weapons, most AI researchers have no interest in building AI weapons — and do not want others to tarnish their field by doing so, potentially creating a major public backlash against AI that curtails its future societal benefits. Indeed, chemists and biologists have broadly supported international agreements that have successfully prohibited chemical and biological weapons, just as most physicists supported the treaties banning space-based nuclear weapons and blinding laser weapons.

In summary, we believe that AI has great potential to benefit humanity in many ways, and that the goal of the field should be to do so. Starting a military AI arms race is a bad idea, and should be prevented by a ban on offensive autonomous weapons beyond meaningful human control.

http://futureoflife.org/AI/open_lett...nomous_weapons



Media commentary:

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/...d-military-ai/

http://time.com/3973500/elon-musk-st...ng-ai-weapons/

[Wraith]

A ban would never work. It would just cripple those who tried to adhere to it, while giving an advantage that grows with time to anyone who ignores it.

This is far less enforceable than other types of weapons bans that have been done in the past. It's just too easy to make these things. I could build an autonomous weapon myself, with nothing but off-the-shelf parts. How do you stop someone with actual resources who wants them?

[Being]

How about little mosquito sized ones armed with brain eating amebas. They fly into your nose and then release the brain eating army.

edit: That's where zombies come from. And they eat brains in an attemp to replace what the ameba has eaten. Zombie apocalypse requires nose-plug first, baseball bat second. I wonder if Walking Dead got this?